


Marks of Another Kind

by sparksfly7



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Unrepentant Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23902423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparksfly7/pseuds/sparksfly7
Summary: Harry traces his fingers over the faint scars on Draco’s chest. They’re hardly prominent, especially on Draco’s pale skin, but they always stand out to Harry, spelling outYou did this. You almost killed him.Draco, the insensitive twat, just rolls his eyes at him.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 225





	Marks of Another Kind

**Author's Note:**

> I've been reading Drarry fics for years, but I didn't think I was capable of writing one. Today, after bingeing some, particularly [GallaPlacidia's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GallaPlacidia), this happened. "This" as in 75% banter and 25% Feels™.

Harry traces his fingers over the faint scars on Draco’s chest. They’re hardly prominent, especially on Draco’s pale skin, but they always stand out to Harry, spelling out _You did this. You almost killed him._

Draco, the insensitive twat, just rolls his eyes at him. “Oh, come on now, Potter. Isn’t it time to stop stewing in your guilt? You’re way past tender into mushy now.”

Harry manages a smile. “So that’s not how you like your meat?”

“I like your meat any way I can get it,” Draco says with a lascivious wink, and Harry flushes. He’d been both surprised and unsurprised to find out how—salacious Draco’s sense of humour is. Then again, he’d always loved to get a rise out of Harry (especially now in a more literal sense). Luna had called their years of schoolboy enmity “an extended dance of foreplay,” and as much as he had spluttered and protested at the time, he can’t really deny it.

“Potter,” Draco says, and then, “Harry?”

He snaps out of his musings. “Yeah?”

Draco studies him with solemn grey eyes. “When are you going to get over this?”

“Get over…what?”

“Oh, don’t play dumb, unless all the time you’ve been spending with Weasley has transmitted his stupidity to you.”

Harry is the one to roll his eyes this time. “Oh, stop pretending you and Ron still hate each other. You play chess with him almost every week.”

Draco turns his nose up. “That’s because it’s amusing to bring an inferior player down a peg. He could learn some things from watching a master at work.”

“He tells me he wins most of your matches – unless you cheat. Which is a lot.”

“How Gryffindor of you both, to assume I’d abide by the rules.”

“I don’t assume that,” Harry says dryly. “Anyway, better you play chess with Ron than me.”

Draco pats his hand patronizingly. “I know that you’re rubbish at chess, Potter. It’s all right, I won’t stop being attracted to you because of that.”

Harry makes a sound that’s half a snort, half a laugh, something Draco elicits from him very often. “I can admit you two are much better chess players than me. But what I mean is you’re both such sore losers that it’s fun to watch you take that out on each other.”

As expected, Draco immediately says, “I’m not a sore loser! I handle defeat as graciously as victory, thank you very much.”

“How about when Hermione wins over you in a debate?”

Draco sniffs. “Granger is far too smug about it that I refuse to indulge her.”

“Fine then. How about all the times I beat you in Quidditch?”

“First of all, it wasn’t that many times. Second of all, it’s because you’re an insufferable prat.”

“Really, _I_ am? Looked in any mirrors lately?”

“I can’t help it. Every time I do, even my reflection is speechless at my beauty.”

“Yes, because you’re the fairest of them all,” Harry laughs.

“I’ve always found that fairy tale rather overrated. Did you know in the first edition of the original version, the prince hit Snow White and that’s how he dislodged the apple from her throat?”

“You know about the original version of Snow White?” Harry asks, flummoxed. “You know Muggle fairy tales?” He remembers how Ron had asked if Cinderella was an illness.

Draco shrugs in the way he does when he’s trying to look casual. “I figured it can’t hurt to become better-acquainted with other spheres of literature,” he says, like he suddenly wanted to learn about French poetry. Except that sounds more likely. “Some of them aren’t bad. The ones without helpless princesses relying on princes to save them, anyway.”

“I don’t know,” Harry says idly. “You’d make a pretty princess. You have the hair for it already.” He fingers a strand of Draco’s hair, fine and more silver than blonde.

Surprisingly, Draco doesn’t get mad at the comment. “Oh sure, you fancy yourself the heroic prince who saved me, do you?” His tone is as sardonic as ever, but when he meets Harry’s gaze, there’s something startlingly vulnerable about the look in his eyes, like the surface of a barely frozen pond that’s in danger of cracking.

“I don’t think I saved you,” Harry says, swallowing, thinking about Draco clinging to him as they flew out of a burning room, about Draco sitting with a lowered head as Harry spoke for him at his trial, about Draco bleeding to death on the cold tiles of a bathroom. “Plus, if I did, then you saved me too.” Draco, avoiding the sight of his swollen face in the Manor. Draco, helpless as Harry wrested his wand out of his hand. Draco, blunt and merciless as he told Harry to pull himself together after the War, that everyone was grieving but he wasn’t grieving now he was moping, that it looked terrible to go from The Boy Who Lived to The Chosen One to The Hermit Who Never Left His House.

Draco’s eyes soften. “How maudlin, Potter,” he drawls. “What’s next? Are you going to write me a love poem? Embroider HP&DM together on a tapestry?”

“Shut up,” Harry says, laughing.

“Hey, maybe you can get some lessons from Weasley on how to write a love song. Fortunately for you, my eyes are much easier to compare to beautiful things outside of pickled toads.”

“She wrote that when we were twelve. How do you still remember that?”

“Don’t you know, Potter? I spent our school years more obsessed with you than the rest of the school put together.”

“You did go out of your way to keep tabs on me,” Harry says thoughtfully.

“You spent a whole year literally stalking me.”

“Because I thought you were up to no good!”

“Don’t you know, Potter.” Draco leers. “I’m always up to no good.”

“Oh, I definitely know that,” Harry murmurs, lowering his hand, finding that Draco is very much ‘up’ and thinking he’d like to get to the ‘to no good’ part.

Draco, the insufferable tease, twists out of his hold and slinks a few inches away.

“What now?” Harry says, exasperated.

“I want to talk.”

“We just talked for like, ten minutes.”

He expects Draco to say something like _congratulations Potter, you can keep track of time without a watch_ , but Draco stays silent and merely keeps staring at him.

“Draco,” Harry says, and it almost comes out like a whine. “Come on.” He can’t just sit there in Harry’s bed, looking like he does, and make Harry only look, not touch.

Draco brings up a hand and runs a hand across his chest. Across his scars. “So these don’t bother you anymore?”

The blood rushing to Harry’s groin chills, almost just like that. “I don’t—it’s not that they _bother_ me.”

Draco gives him an almost pitying look. “You’re such a bad liar, Harry.”

It’s the fact that Draco uses his first name that makes him cave. Harry hangs his head. And then snaps it up a second later. “You know it’s not that I find them unattractive or anything like that, right? I really don’t mind the way they look.”

Draco rolls his eyes for the umpteenth time. “Oh please, Potter. I’m not concerned with _vanity_.”

“You sure about that, Mr. I Own More Hair Products Than Most Girls?”

“The only girl you regularly associate with is Granger, and frankly, she would benefit from an application of Sleekeazy’s once in a while.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Hermione’s hair,” Harry protests, and is subject to another eye roll of epic proportions in return.

“Oh right, look who I’m talking to. I’m surprised birds aren’t roosting in that mess atop your skull, to be honest.”

“You like my hair,” Harry says, unruffled. “Plus, it would be at least ten percent less messy if you weren’t pulling on it all the time.”

Finally, he’s the one to make Draco flush. “That’s hardly the point.”

“Then what is the point?” Harry asks, teasing.

Draco’s expression sobers. “The point is if we’re going to linger on guilt for past mistakes, then I should be drowning in it. Harry, the worst thing you did in Sixth Year was use a spell you didn’t know the consequences of and maim someone who was attacking you. The worst thing I did was let Death Eaters into our school and cause the death of our Headmaster.” His mouth twists wryly. “That’s not to mention all the other people I almost killed, including your best friend.”

Harry’s mouth goes dry. The only thing he can manage to say is, “Ron forgives you, you know.”

Draco lets out a laugh that’s so dry Harry winces hearing it. “Yeah, I’m amazed by that, to be honest. I would never forgive me if I were in his position, not just for the mead but for all the things I’ve done to him over the years. And Granger as well.” He pauses. “Then again, you Gryffindors have always been impossibly forgiving and noble.” Only Draco could make that sound like an insult.

“I don’t know about being ‘impossibly forgiving and noble.’ I just think that rather than hold onto all this anger and resentment by hating someone, someone who’s changed and who regrets what he did, it’s healthier to let it go. To move on. Luna told me that forgiving someone isn’t something that just benefits the other person; it benefits you too.”

Draco is silent for a moment. “She has some wise sayings, doesn’t she.”

“She really does,” Harry says, “until she starts talking about Nargles and Heliopaths again, that is.”

They share a laugh at that, but it lapses into a rather awkward silence.

Draco is the one to break it. “It’s no wonder the Sorting Hat didn’t put you into Slytherin. We have made holding onto grudges an art form. You should see how Pansy and Blaise do it.”

“Is making sarcasm into an art form a Slytherin trait too? You all seem to be masters at it.”

Draco pats him on the head. “Don’t worry, Potter. You’re getting there. You have some surprisingly clever moments of snark.”

“…thank you,” Harry says dryly. “That means the world to me from someone whose best insult was ‘Potter stinks.’”

Draco claps. “See, that one right there was pretty good!”

Harry shakes his head, but he’s smiling. “You’re impossible.”

“No, I believe that’s you, The Boy Who Lived Twice.”

Harry makes a face. “Please, never call me that again.”

“Oh, you don’t like it?” Draco blinks, the picture of wide-eyed innocence. “Not cool enough? How about The Saviour of the Wizarding World? He Who Shall Be Named and Praised?”

“Stop it,” Harry says, hiding his face, but even so he’s pulled into helpless laughter. “You’re terrible.”

Draco takes his hands away from his face and looks at him very seriously. “You’re going to stop feeling bad about my scars.” It’s not a request.

“You’re going to stop feeling bad about the war,” Harry counters, and Draco’s mouth twists in that bitter way again.

“I don’t think that’s quite the same magnitude.”

“You’re going to try,” Harry amends. “Ron’s forgiven you. Hermione’s forgiven you. Hagrid’s forgiven you. When are you going to forgive yourself?”

“Have _you_ forgiven me?” Draco suddenly asks, that vulnerable look back in his eyes.

“Draco… I didn’t even hold it against you. Not once I thought about everything you’ve gone through, the things you had to witness, the pressure you were under.”

Draco drops his eyes. “I doubt it can compare to what you went through. You died.”

“Really, are we going to have a competition of who had it worse? I really don’t think you can top the dying part.”

“I’ll let you have that,” Draco says graciously, “since it’s the only thing you’re going to top.”

“Draco!” Harry says, dissolving into laughter again, and Draco smiles at him, so soft and warm that there’s no hint the ice in his expression ever existed. The smile he reserves for Harry, like the first verdant shoot sprouting out of the previously frozen ground in spring.

He reaches out a hand and cups Harry’s cheek and, with the other, puts Harry’s over his sternum. Harry flattens his hand over Draco’s chest, over the faint white scars he left, and thinks about how maybe he’s leaving behind marks of another kind, ones that aren’t visible but are no less powerful. He brings his lips to Draco’s skin, kissing each scar gently, reverently, like they’re fresh wounds he could heal with his touch. And then he moves his mouth to Draco’s.

Draco lets out a sigh like he’s relaxing for the first time in years. “Harry.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think!


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